Tim Cahill - WPF Performance Guidance, Thoughts, & Tips

This blog is no longer being updated or maintained, but it is archived for future use. Please direct all WPF performance inquires to the WPF forum: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=119&SiteID=1 Thanks, Tim

If you’re like the many folks who have asked us for a 'list of performance suggestions', your prayers have been answered. My colleague & friend Kiran Kumar , has partnered with the brilliant folks on our SDK team (Lorin in particular), to document...

Since I posted my initial article on command-line profiling , I've found a number of folks copy/paste off of it fairly often, with moderate success. If you don't want to know all of the 'why's' and just want to get your profile, run the the following...

Background Over the past few months we’ve been getting feedback that manipulating 3D collections can be slow. It turns out there is more that one way to skin a … collection (horse references omitted). In this article I profile many of the collection...

My colleague Henry Hahn & I have recorded a primer on WPF performance for all to see. Available on MSDN TV as of yesterday, we discuss the approaches that we take when optimizing WPF applications. Make sure and check us out !

A couple days ago, an article was posted on the DevX portal discussing WPF graphics & performance (my favorite two subjects). You can find it here here . Definitely worth a read, especially since Mr. Woodruff mentions this blog! It’s always really...

I’ve been getting a lot of the same performance questions over the last few months regarding the WPF graphics model, so I thought I’d post some responses for everyone to see. This should shed some light on what WPF does and doesn’t offer in terms of fast...

Just in case you haven’t noticed, Beta2 of the Windows Presentation Foundation went live on 5/23. And since the February CTP, we’ve been doing tons of great performance work. Many scenarios, especially 3D applications & apps using 1000's of Shapes...

I've 3 new tricks to add to a few of my earlier postings: 1. In my batch file for VSTS profiling I use sleep.exe. This isn't on a few of my machines, so you may not have it either. A quick web search shows this is part of the Windows Server 2003 resource...

I just found out something neat . VSTS tells you how many samples were taken in kernel mode. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you where in kernel mode that time was spent. But, it does tell you if you need to be thinking about kernel-mode time, which makes...

Recently I’ve been reading up on Rico Mariani’s blog . What a gem! One especially profound article he’s posted talks about the challenges in promoting good performance culture. First-rate performance doesn’t happen by accident. Like having a solid feature...

I've gotten a few questions about other profiling tools to use when profiling WPF applications. I'm putting this on my 'things-to-do' list, but if anyone has experience with using other profilers against WPF, I'd love to hear about it. In the meantime...

Pablo posted a great article over on his blog describing what a hardware-accelerated WPF means to your app. There's also a interesting overview of the various places you can hook into the WPF stack.

Over in the forums a handful of folks have pointed out that profiling WPF is less than seemless, and can be super-frustrating. Even with profiles in-hand, sometimes there isn't a bunch non-WPFers can do without some guidance. One of my personal goals...

Toward the end of my next-to-last post I suggested using the command-line to control profiling. I've been experimenting with this functionality and wanted to post what I've learned. First, IanWho’s blog is a pretty amazing source of VSTS Profiler info...

I'm working on an article for next week where I walk through a WPF performance profile using Visual Studio 2005. The problem is, I don't have anything to profile! Sure I can make something up myself, but I'd much rather walk through something sent in...

This is the first in a series of upcoming blogs about solving WPF performance problems. I’m going to start with a basic overview of the tools, approaches, and thinking needed to tackle these challenges. If you’re skills are already beyond that point stay...

If you haven't already heard, the Feb. CTP of WinFX was released this morning. For me, this release is super-exciting because it includes lots of good work our performance team has been driving. So if you haven’t got it yet, run over to the MSDN website...

Welcome! I work on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) performance team, focused primarily on graphics & rendering performance. In the future I'll be blogging about WPF, including articles on WPF performance & graphics. In the meantime...